Craig Weller Interview

New Ideas: Why Your Workouts Don't Need To Hurt

Michelle Magnan: So what would eustress training look like to an everyday gym-goer?

Craig Weller: A fixed volume type of workout is a good example. If you’re using that model, you can play math with it and look at improving every workout based on intensity, density or volume. Say you do 50 reps of a deadlift with 100 pounds in 20 minutes. You can look to do that same amount of weight for the same number of reps faster, or you can do the same weight in the same time for more reps, or you can do same time, same reps but more weight. You can basically hit a personal record every workout.

At first it’s going to seem kind of slow, if you’re used to distress-based training, but if you’re really looking for improvement with every workout and you’re training frequently, you can improve through intensity, density or volume in every workout. Within a few months, you’re pulling or moving quite a lot of weight for a lot of reps, sometimes very quickly, but you’re still making it look easy and it’s not taxing your body in a way that breaks you down. There’s no significant stress response. Your cortisol levels don’t get jacked up.

Otherwise, you can just apply the same perspective to almost any workout and go through it as fast as you can with the heaviest weight you can, regardless of the set/reps scenario or frame of the workout, and you just do it without making it distressing on your body. You do it as hard and fast as you can, without pain or distress.

MM: Guys who are used to working out hard will read this as you telling them to take it easy. What do you say to that?

CW: It’s not going easy. You just have a different constraint. In training this way, you can make adaptations really quickly, because it allows for very frequent training because you’re not breaking yourself down. You don’t have the stress response you have with distress training. You can do relatively heavy squats, deadlifts and compound movements much more frequently, like up to every day. Once you grasp that and can really work on progressing the workouts, you can do incredible things. So, eustress is not a way to limit your strength or your workload, it’s re-framing how you work towards your goal.

MM: How should a guy start incorporating this into his program, if he’s already working out?

CW: Try a simple math workout, like the 50-rep workout, and repeat it somewhat frequently using a pattern that’s not going to break down with fatigue. For example, do two total workouts like this a week -- one lower, like a deadlift, and one upper, like a pull-up or overhead press. If a guy’s doing a normal Men’s Health-y bodybuilding or strength-training program, remove a lower body training day in the normal sense and replace it with a eustress front squat or deadlift workout, and you can alternate the two if you want. Spend a month or two at it and look for improvement in one of those variables every time. You’ll be lifting more weight than you thought you ever would, quicker or for more reps -- and it’s going to feel easy.

Also, monitor your movement quality. Sometimes, people will improve in strength or volume or whatever, but they do so by sacrificing movement quality - they don’t squat as deep or their deadlift gets all hunchback-like. In the things that matter, they’re actually sliding backwards, so monitor that carefully.

MM: How does eustress training improve on problems associated with typical regimes?

CW: It will allow you to do heavy, high-quality movement for a very long time -- for months or years -- and to improve consistently without hurting yourself. A lot of people are in a state of constant stress. Adding another spike to that stress level isn’t necessarily what they need. Think of the set-up that yoga has, where you’re doing something physically difficult, but the way you get through it is by staying very calm. It tends to be refreshing for people. [Similarly], eustress can be a way of balancing people out and looking at the bigger picture of what we’re trying to do with physical training -- trying to make people happier, healthier and stronger.